If your organization looking for a CMMS/ maintenance software solution? If it is, you need to be aware of common pitfalls that can happen during the selection process and make your final choice a nightmare to use. Depending on the background of who is making the selection, one or more of these pitfalls can trip up the selection process. CMMS software selection can be driven by someone from the IT department, someone from the maintenance department or someone from operations/ administration. Not being familiar with CMMS software and it’s uses can result in the user making the selection being blindsided to potential problems that will make the final software selected not being very useful to the organization. In this two part post we will discuss common selection mistakes and how to avoid them.

What are these pitfalls?

Seduced by the lower cost and easy deployment of a web hosted CMMS: Here a vendor offers maintenance management software product that is available as a service (Software as a Service – SaaS). Monthly fees are lower and charged by the number of users. Deployment is easier because you just need an Internet connection and a web browser to access it. What is there not to like about this! The problem is that you are now locked into paying monthly fees forever. If you want to add more users you start paying significantly more. You need to compare the costs of paying a one-time license fee against about three years of the subscription cost of a hosted solution to get an idea of comparable costs. You also need to consider future migration costs. What happens to your data if you decide to switch to another provider? How will you get your data and how will you be able to load it into the new system? Who owns your data? What happens to you if the vendor goes out of business or faces other problems providing service?

Selecting a great looking solution that has a lot of bells and whistles: This is something that can bite someone who is not too familiar with maintenance management – typically a person from the IT department or administration/ operations who is selecting CMMS software. In such cases make sure that the maintenance workflow provide by the CMMS software is something your maintenance team can use. Make sure that it does not force them to completely change their maintenance practices to accommodate the CMMS software. Some changes in maintenance practices may be helpful to accommodate future goals but major changes are usually difficult to accommodate and will probably just be ignored. You must review such workflows with the maintenance manager, maintenance planners and maintenance technicians to make sure that they will work.

Thinking that solutions that offer a lot of training and hands on support must be good.CMMS software products that require training before use should raise a red flag – they typically are more complex products. Such products are generally harder to use and getting training is going to eat up a lot of maintenance department time! What happens when people leave and you get new employees on board – who pays for the training? Will maintenance department performance suffer when new employees are being brought up to speed on the CMMS software?

More pitfalls ahead (discussed in Part 2)!

In the second part of this post “CMMS Software Selection Mistakes (Part 2)” we cover a few more pitfalls that can trip up the best selection processes. You may also want to have a look at our recently updated CMMS/ Maintenance Software Selection Guide for additional hints and advice on selecting the right CMMS software for your organization.